


The Soul as a Wasteland

by thatsrightdollface



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Afterlife, Character Study, D.I.C.E. - Freeform, Gen, Headcanon, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 08:59:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17978315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: The boy has to deliver his application for...  Something.  He's not sure anymore, but it matters more than anything.  Kokichi Oma is trying to catch him.





	The Soul as a Wasteland

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!!! I hope you enjoy this story, if you read it. :D I... really like writing out different afterlife/ghost story ideas, ahahaha. This one features an interpretation of pre-game Kokichi, too. I'm not sure exactly how he compares to other interpretations of pre-game Kokichi, but hopefully it came through okay. Sorry as always for any mistakes I made!!!
> 
> Thank you for reading -- have a great day~~~

The boy had taken the long way home after school that day, because he was going to drop off his application to...  Something.  It was hard to say exactly what, now, except that the thought of it tasted crackling and sweet and alive, like grape soda and being noticed.  Like possibilities and making a cute guy laugh and feeling powerful.  It was hope at the end of a long, grey road, and even though he couldn’t remember exactly what the application was for...  Mm. It barely mattered. The boy walked on and on and on.   
  
He didn’t remember the street being so empty yesterday - he didn’t remember the windows looking so oily and dead.  Had his bag always been this heavy?  Had his mouth always tasted like ash?    
  
The sky was a hole.  The boy sometimes couldn’t feel the concrete beneath his carefully polished school shoes. Going numb, wasn’t he?  
  
It felt sort of like he could’ve fallen into that sky, if he’d wanted to.  If he’d let go. The sky was a hole deeper than anything, deeper than anyone and rotten or wonderful or...  Oh, whatever. It didn’t matter.  The boy had to get his application in right away, and then everything would change.    
  
His hair was flippy purple and his eyes were cloudy and everyone would be sorry, someday.  His cellphone charms rattled against each other sometimes, as he walked - a couple fake blood-splattered dice, a bear split down the middle and grinning like death, a cupcake with little skulls for sprinkles on top.  The phone had died a long time ago.   
  
The boy didn’t notice the pale white straitjacket ghost until he had been following him for quite a while.  The ghost had flippy hair just like his, and a chain hanging down his back like he’d torn it out of a wall somewhere. He had been darting over the rooftops, jumping from skyscraper ledge to skyscraper ledge like he wasn’t afraid of splattering apart on the pavement. Like he wasn’t afraid of anything.  He was wearing a plastic clown mask, but the boy knew this ghost would have his very same face on underneath it.   
  
Kokichi Oma.  The boy knew this ghost’s name was Kokichi Oma, and that he’d hung those little bloody dice from his phone in his honor.  Wanting to claim him, and pin him down, somehow.  Everything that he was supposed to mean.   
  
Kokichi ducked - nearly invisible, when he wanted to be - through the hidden parts of buildings, up above. The boy lost sight of him sometimes, but he knew he was always close enough.    
  
Sometimes the boy thought he had doodled Kokichi Oma in all his notebooks when he should have been studying... Trying to master Kokichi’s smile, or something like that. Most of the time he thought Kokichi was chasing him, now, and his eyes were burning and furious behind the shiny grin of his mask.   
  
There were dead people on the streets, too, but only every now and then. They were stained with poison, turning their veins into a maze of sour purple vines...  Or maybe they were mushed into a sticky pulp. What could’ve crushed a whole body like that, so you could only really see pieces of the bone, like a ruined puzzle?  Blood got on the boy’s shoes, then, as he walked on by.   
  
That hole of a sky stared down all the time, unfeeling, and one day - no, it was that same day, wasn’t it?  The boy had only just gotten out of school - Kokichi caught him.  He came up behind the boy and hit the back of his neck hard, hard, hard with the handle of a knife. With his fist. Kokichi’s skin was still warm, somehow, unnaturally warm in that frozen place. His knife had a tiny dice-shaped logo and a smiley face carved sloppily along the blade, the boy knew.  He’d drawn Kokichi’s knife so many times, after all, practicing too hard at making it look anything but practiced.   
  
Kokichi dragged the boy beneath the street, then, down a winding crumbly staircase and past so many crackling static screens. Some of them had curtains on them, like they were playing at being windows.  They revealed just the shadow of faces, sometimes - people or not people, whatever, moving through an unnatural electronic mist.    
  
“I got ‘im,” Kokichi said into a cellphone with no phone charms dangling from it.  Actually, it looked like part of the phone was broken...  Like a fistful of charms had been snapped off in rage or panic or something.  Kokichi waited a beat, and then answered the voice on the other end of the line - “No, he didn’t put up a fight. Aw, he never does.  He’s really nothing like me at all.”  
  
Normally, Kokichi’s voice would be buoyant and sing-song, theatrical or threatening or both.  Normally.  Right now it was raw and quiet, as if all the emotion had been drained like blood into a tube.   
  
“He’s _stubborn_ like you,” said a voice on the other end of the line.  It was such a fond, knowing voice.  So tender it could have broken the boy’s heart. It made sense _Kokichi_ could get someone to love him like that.   
  
“Bite your tongue, Shuichi,” Kokichi said, pretend-snapping.  “I’m way more stubborn than this loser could ever be.”  
  
“Thank you for trying again,” Shuichi said.  “If he’s a part of you, I hate thinking of him out there...”  
  
“He’s not a part of me,” Kokichi said.  “But I’ll see ya soon, Mr. Detective!”  
  
Kokichi hung up, and tied a Harlequin-print scarf around the boy’s eyes.  He tugged it on maybe a little too tightly, and then hefted him onto his back, muttering “Alley-oop!” down at his feet like a cartoon character.  Just the way the boy had always imagined him.   
  
They walked a long way in the dark, then.  When Kokichi finally took the blindfold off, the boy was tied to a strict iron-backed chair in an apartment deep, deep underground. It was the messiest apartment the boy had ever seen, with spilled soda cans and half-eaten snacks ground into the carpet and sticking out of drawers.  There were stacks of board games growing dusty on the shelves, and comic books with cards sticking out of them every now and then like somebody’d been taking notes.  This was Kokichi’s room.  It had to have been - he had so many toys the boy might have liked to play with, and the card tower on the desk was so meticulous, so risky, it seemed like it could fall apart if a person just looked at it too hard.   
  
There was a framed photo of a guy with a shy smile and calculating eyes - Shuichi, from the phone, probably.  And there were photos of other people too, people the boy didn’t know with interesting outfits and - he was sure - meaningful lives.  There were lots of pictures of people dressed like Kokichi, too...  That had to be his infamous gang, D.I.C.E.  The boy had never even given the members individual names, when he’d dreamed D.I.C.E. up in his notebooks.   
  
Kokichi was standing in a corner, staring at one of those photos of D.I.C.E. and eating gummy snacks when the boy realized where he was.  The gummy snacks were getting smeared on Kokichi’s fingers, grape and strawberry and artificial as the kindest sort of lie.  Kokichi looked a thousand miles away.   
  
The boy hated that.  He felt like everyone was a thousand miles away, sometimes.  They should have looked at him; they should’ve cared what he had to say.   
  
“I’m gonna submit this application,” the boy told Kokichi Oma.  _His_ Kokichi Oma, wearing his own face in a way he’d never learned how.  “And then we’ll see.”  
  
Kokichi’s head snapped to look at the boy, up and down, quickly, with his lip curling.  Disgusted. “Why?” Kokichi said.  His voice was like another fist on the back of the boy’s neck. “What could I _possibly see,_ with an application like that?”   
  
“That I’m a leader,” the boy said, as if reading lines that had become so much a part of him they felt tattooed on the inside of his eyelids.  “That I can be dangerous, when I want to be.”  
  
“You threw away your people!” Kokichi cackled. “Some leader.  Try again. Impress me, ‘kay?”  
  
“That I matter.”  
  
“You mattered more than your people?  Tsk.  I wouldn’t call a leader who said _that_ sort of thing ‘Ultimate,’ would you?”  Kokichi took a deep breath.  He was the Ultimate Supreme Leader, wasn’t he?  Maybe he thought he knew.  He offered the boy his bag of gummy snacks, and the boy shook his head.  His hands were tied, anyway.  He wouldn’t have been able to take one.   
  
“You know...” Kokichi drawled. “It was horrible of you, giving me a team to lead that never even existed.  I think about them all the time, but I can’t save them.  Not like I could save you.  Possibly.”  
  
“I need to submit this application,” the boy said.  Why wasn’t Kokichi understanding?  “Then we can prove everything we need to.  It’s okay.  I’ll take care of us.”  
  
“Uh. I have a hard time believing you tried to take care of anybody, really.  A classmate.  A goldfish.  _Anybody_.”  Kokichi sighed.  Swallowed another handful of gummy snacks.  “Am I wrong?”  
  
“I don’t know,” the boy said.  “Everyone’s always so far away.”  
  
“You must have cared about some of them...  Right?  I wish I could’ve had a family, like yours. Like ours?  Ugh. Nothing’s ‘ours.’”  
  
Our hair. Our face. Our masks.  Our skin and breakable bones, splattered on the streets just above here.   
  
Ours.   
  
“I need to submit this application.”  The boy felt himself getting angry.  The world inside him stretched far too far, and all of the windows were empty.  All of the streets were cold.  Where was he supposed to go, but forward?  What was he supposed to be but something new?    
  
“You created me to be a leader,” Kokichi said. “And gave me a team I’d love, a team I’ll never meet, really.  Will you let me lead you out of here, at least?”  
  
“I need to submit this application,” the boy said back, without even pausing to let the words sink in.  He knew what he had to say, had to be.  He knew his hands shook when he stood in front of the classroom, and he knew Kokichi’s hands didn’t.  He knew he second-guessed his crushes, his wants, his words...  And he knew Kokichi didn’t have to.  Would never have to.   
  
He knew what he had to become, over and over again.   
  
Kokichi laughed, softly. Hatefully.   
  
“Shuichi’s right,” he said.  “You’re so damn stubborn.  I’d tell you I loved that about you, but even I couldn’t tell such an awful lie.”


End file.
